Nature loss is a planetary emergency. Humanity has already wiped out 83% of wild mammals and half of all plants and severely altered three-quarters of ice-free land and two-thirds of marine environments. One million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades – a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next ten years.

The Government of Ethiopia and more specifically, the Rural Land Administration and Use Directorate, (RLAUD) has identified land use planning as an important tool for the sustainable development of the country. Land use planning is vital for optimising the use of the land and for reconciling conflicts between different land uses. Land use planning should be carried out at different levels – from national to regional to local including community: these different levels should support and integrate with each other.

This publication was produced as part of the digital interactive exhibition Droughts in the Anthropocene, prepared for the fortieth session of the UNESCO General Conference. Droughts in the Anthropocene features fifteen case studies from around the world showcasing the social, environmental and cultural impacts of droughts and water scarcity. It highlights solutions offered by collaboration between scientists and local communities, and the important work of UNESCO IHP and partners in bridging science with society and policymakers to better address the impact of droughts.

Resilience-building planning in drylands requires a participatory, integrated approach that incorporates issues of scale (often large scale) and the interconnectedness of dryland ecological and social systems. In an often political environment that supports small, “manageable” administrative units and the decentralisation of power and resources to them, planning at large scale is particularly challenging; development agents in particular may find it difficult to work across administrative boundaries and/or collaboratively.

In a world in which poverty is increasingly concentrated in vulnerable or fragile states, and fragility is increasingly driven by climate change, climate-induced displacement has become one of the most visible manifestations of the relationship between ecological and societal breakdown. Newest figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveal that over 70% of the 33 million newly displaced people (2019) had climate-related triggers.

This paper explores the land footprint related to EU bioenergy consumption and aims to contribute to the discussion on how EU bioenergy targets impact on scarce global land resources, both cropland and forest areas. In the last decade, demand for EU bioenergy has risen significantly, largely driven by political targets and subsidies. Our calculations show that the total land footprint related to EU bioenergy is likely to expand from 44.5 Mha (an area of the size of Sweden) in 2010 to 70.2 Mha (an area of the size of Poland and Sweden combined) in 2030.

Investments that reduce food loss and waste can deliver big wins on two pressing issues of our time: food security and environmental sustainability, according to a new World Bank report. But the results are not automatic -- countries need well-targeted solutions.

The report addresses a much debated issue – bioenergy and associated land use change, and how the climate change mitigation from use of bioenergy can be influenced by greenhouse gas emissions arising from land use change. The purpose of this background report is to supply a more detailed, fully referenced version for practitioners, and researchers, in support of the short version (IEA Bioenergy: ExCo:2010:03) which was aimed at policy advisors and policy makers.

Rangelands cover a surface area of more than 2 million hectares in Cameroon. Despite their relatively unpredictable climate and unproductive nature they provide a wide variety of goods and services including forage for livestock, habitat for wildlife, water and minerals, woody products, recreational services, nature conservation as well as acting as carbon sinks. Rangelands in Cameroon are predominantly grassland savanna with three types distinguishable: the Guinean savanna, Sudan savanna (also known as ‘derived montane grasslands’), and the Sahel savanna.

US cities are at the forefront of the sustainable development challenge. They contain 80% of the country’s population, and therefore have the capacity to make or break SDG achievement (US Census Bureau 2016). But, while crucial to SDG attainment, they Executive Summary cannot accomplish this alone. While 80 percent of US residents live in urban areas, only 3 percent of land is urban; rural and urban areas are deeply interconnected (US Census Bureau 2016).

Key findings of the Sustainable Development Report 2019
World nations obtain their worst performance on SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 15 (Life on Land). No country obtains a “green rating” (the report’s indicator for the achievement of an SDG) on SDG 14 (Life Below Water).

The 2019 Africa SDG Index and Dashboards Report is a call for action not only to meet the SDGs but also to ensure timely and high-quality data on SDG indicators. The report focuses on the efforts that African governments are taking to incorporate the SDGs into their national strategies, budgets, public engagements, and coordination among branches of government. This report includes all 54 African countries and their country profiles.